Why Kik's Young Users Have Swapped 350 Million Texts - With Bots

When you’re one of the most popular messaging apps among teens in the United States, you can’t resort to traditional banner ads. You probably can’t use cutting-edge, programmatic advertising techniques that track, divvy up and target your users with just the right personalised ad, either.

You need the next big thing in mobile advertising, and right now that just might be brand bots.

Brand bots are automated accounts that run on messaging services like Kik that “chat” one-on-one with thousands of human users. The bot marketing phenomenon has been gaining strength on messaging apps that skew towards younger users, like Kik and Tinder, which has an estimated 50 million monthly active users.

Kik has 200 million registered users, more than a third of whom are aged between 16 and 24, and it's taking on 250,000 new users each day. More than 10 million of them have already chatted with brand bots since Kik introduced Promoted Chats in November 2014. (Unsanctioned bots, typically porn bots run by spammers, had been running rampant on the mobile chatting platform for years.)

In the seven months since Kik launched Promoted Chats, more than 350 million messages have been sent and received between human users and promoted chat accounts. That's a lot of chatting with completely artificial entities. Many of the brands behind these bots are media companies like Funny or Die, Moviefone, or content platform Massively.

One example of the brand bots at play: Massively recently launched a campaign to promote horror flick Insidious 3. Instead of the usual static or video ads, it created a bot that represented the movie’s heroine Quinn Brenner. The Brenner bot can hold a stilted conversation with a Kik user, telling them things like, “Some weird stuff has been going on.”

For movie studios the marketing potential here must be tantalizing. If they can program their bots to be moderately realistic, chat app users can feel as though they’re chatting with fictional characters and develop a stronger bond with a movie or TV show.

DNA Studios, the producers of sci-fi film Ex-Machina, set up a clever marketing stunt on Tinder earlier this year in which a chat bot played the role of their main female character, an android in the film. During chats with other Tinder users, the bot would eventually sent a link to the film’s website, revealing her artificial origins.

More 60 companies have Promoted Chat accounts on Kik. Funny or Die’s bot has chatted with an astonishing 1.5 million users, while accessories retailer Skull Candy’s had chatted with 300,000 within the first three months of its launch. “That surpassed their
Twitter following, which took two or three years to build,” says Kik press office Rod McLeod.

Waterloo, Canada-based Kik uses something like a freemium business model with its promoted chats. Brands like Skull Candy can set up their accounts for free, but if they want to acquire more users they have to pay Kik for the access. Nearly all 60 brands on the platform have gone on to pay for access to more users.

Kik CEO Ted Livingston believes this is the future of how companies will engage with their customers. Nobody is downloading apps anymore, he says. "This is why official accounts are doing so well in China. You don’t have to download a new app. You just chat with new friends."

Livinston is referring to China’s most popular messaging app WeChat, which has more than 500 million monthly active users and is on the forefront of the trend for messaging apps to become fully-fledged hubs for communication, entertainment and commerce -- a modern-day portal to the web.

The closely-watched Internet Trends report from Mary Meeker, a partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, said this week that messaging platforms like Kik, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, LINE and Snapchat were “aiming to create cross-platform operating systems.... for more and more services.”

On WeChat, you can order food, play games, send money and order a taxi among other things. Increasingly, WeChat is replacing the browser as a means to access websites for companies and organisations too.

“There are more official accounts created on WeChat than there are websites put on the internet in China,” Livingston says, citing direct sources at WeChat.

Call them official accounts, promoted chats, or brand bots, they’re already an established business model among chat apps in Asia. Livingston claims the model is helping his bottom line, though at this point he’ll only hint about their impact on revenue.

I cover developments in AI, robotics, chatbots, digital assistants and emerging tech in Europe. I've spent close to a decade profiling the hackers and dreamers who are bringing the most cutting-edge technology into our lives, for better or worse. I'm the author of "We Are ...